Upgrade - 304: Somebody’s Gotta Do It and It’s Gonna Be Us

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

This week we welcome Apple's Bob Borchers and Ronak Shah to the show to discuss macOS Big Sur, including all the new features in Safari. There's also an awful lot of follow-up from the busy WWDC week that was, and we discuss the possible features of new Macs running Apple silicon.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 304 and today's show is brought to you very kindly by pingdom linode and bombas my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley what a week it's been oh yeah i know big like about as big a week as weeks can be has been the last week really big exciting stuff we've got so much more to dig into like you know i feel like after wwdc on our last episode i felt like oh that was a big wwdc but then there's been a lot of stuff that's happened since as well that was literally one thing had happened last week yeah one thing so much so much not even the state of the union let alone four more days with hundreds of sessions just the one thing and i felt like yeah well this was a big week on monday morning and we're gonna

get into some of that but i think we'll just say we're at the top we We have a big interview coming later on in this episode. So we're going to talk about some of the little extra things that we found out about WWDC. But later on in the episode, we're going to be joined by Bob Borchers and Ronak Shah from Apple's product marketing team. And we're going to be talking about macOS Big Sur and Safari. So I'm really, really excited to bring that interview to our Upgradians. Mixer and Safari. So I'm really, really excited to bring that interview to our Upgradians. Yes, indeed. We talked to them last week. They were at Apple Park. It was very exciting. And we will be playing that later.

But before we begin, I have a hashtag snow talk question for you from Steven. What was your favorite lunch that you had during WWDC 2020? I hate no box lunches. And and honestly it was such a busy week i didn't even go outside basically and my lunch situation was was grim um because i'm sharing the house with with teenagers who eat everything and so like we ran out of lunch meat at one point i had a i so i had a series of of sad give up lunches i had some uh some pita chips and hummus one day was all i could muster i had some english muffins with uh with peanut butter and jelly on them which was lovely except that's also what i had for breakfast that day right but i did have a turkey i did have a turkey sandwich at least once, maybe twice. And that's generally my go-to is a turkey sandwich.

Sometimes a peanut butter sandwich and sometimes leftovers. But I don't think I had any leftovers last week. So nothing spectacular. In other words, it was a WWDC lunch. If you would like to send in a hashtag Snell Talk question to help us start an episode of Upgrade, you could just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk. Or now, if you're in the Real AFM members Discord, just use the question mark sign followed by Snell Talk

and you could submit a question there too. So let's talk about some of the little things that we found out over the intervening week from WWDC. A lot of stuff that we didn't know about a lot of things which are new and exciting one of them was an accessibility feature that very like lots of people been really excited about i've been seeing this and lots of youtube videos and stuff which is a feature called back tap so you can double or triple tap on the back of an iphone and it can perform a set of actions and there are some ones that Apple define,

but probably the best one is you can set a shortcut action right there as well. So you could run a shortcut, open any application or basically anything you can do with shortcuts you can do. And you can set two of these, both double and triple tap. And this is like a really cool little feature that this is as we talk about every year, I think we find something like this now, where something is an accessibility feature and it has been created for really great reasons, right? To help people who need a little bit more assistance in using their device. But one of the great things about accessibility features

is that they can benefit everyone. And this is one of those features, I think. Yeah, again, the story with accessibility is that not only is it serving specific audiences, but there are all sorts of other people who can benefit from it. And that's one of the reasons that accessibility is important is that everybody needs accessibility to a certain degree at some point in their lives. If you are fortunate enough to live to an old age, you're going to have accessibility needs that you don't have right now, possibly. And Apple, this is one of those great examples where Apple makes a feature with one audience in mind, but it's got a broader reach too. So it's another great thing about Apple caring about accessibility. Yeah.

And I haven't, I'm not running the Bayer on my phone yet, so I haven't worked out exactly what I would set this up for, but I'm thinking probably camera for one, and then I don't know what I would set my triple tap as, but I feel like the camera is a pretty good double tap action for me. What do you think you might do i i don't know i i the shortcut stuff tempts me like could i like turn on the light or unlock my front door or something like that um maybe so i might go i might go with that but um but camera's a good one

too yeah i i will explore it i have um i have it on a beta on an iPhone, but not my primary iPhone because I'm not a maniac. Right. Okay. I think a lot of the upgradients are maniacs, Jason. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know. And I love them.

They're beautiful maniacs, but I'm not willing yet. You know, the betas come out and you're like, it's a long summer. Do I want to have beta software on all my devices that I rely on for the whole summer? And, you know, I can usually put it off for a few weeks. So I have. The force touch gesture and action, I guess, feature, I would say say is probably a better

way of describing it is gone from watch os 7 yeah yeah and that that has some big uh interface ramifications there's actually a whole session about this about not about force touches it's about new ui in watch os and a lot of it is about getting rid of this contextual menu thing through force touch that is not discoverable. We've known since it first started that it's not discoverable. Obviously, there was a period where Apple thought that pressing harder on a screen was something that people would do. And they have now realized that that's not a thing that anyone will do.

And so they're pulling it out. And I think we're going to see in watchOS 7, you're going to see a lot more kind of like floating icons over portions of the screen to indicate there's more to do, like you would see on iOS. You're going to see more hierarchical menus, like where you can go in deeper down and then back up. You're going to see more actions in list views

where you'll scroll up or down to the bottom or top of a list and you'll have more like actions that might previously have been hidden. I think it's actually going to be better because they're more discoverable than the force touches. But I suspect it also means that the next Apple Watch is going to be able to be thinner because it's not going to have to have all of the force touch hardware that senses the extra pressure on the screen. I will say for myself that since Apple removed 3D Touch and made it like long pressing, like the haptic touch, which is long pressing, I can never get the watch thing to work the way I expect it to because I don't press anymore. I just hold my finger on my thumb on my iPhone or my iPad, right? Like I just hold it in place and it will perform the action that I want. So when I'm on my watch and I want to say like clear all the notifications, I just

find myself just holding my finger on the display, but that's not doing what it needs. I actually need to apply the pressure. So I think for consistency across all of the devices, it actually makes sense to remove this feature, I think. But I'm intrigued to see from a hardware perspective, what does this enable Apple to do? Because it's going to give them something, right? And I'm intrigued to see what that ends up providing them with by removing the functionality there. Yeah, it could be thinner, could have more battery, could be something else, who knows? There have been so many improvements to shortcuts. More than we'll mention here.

We might get into this in a future episode. But just at a very high level, lots of new automation triggers, lots of new ones, and pretty much all of the automations can be run in the background, which we wanted, which is fantastic. So you can set a time of day automation

and it will run without your confirmation. That stuff is fantastic. Plus, you know, the organization, there's basically an entire overhaul of a lot of the application. They've really embraced the design for iPad idea that Apple was talking about with sidebars and stuff like that.

And you can also copy and paste actions when you're creating shortcuts now as well which is which is way better yeah yeah the the folders uh it's great for organization the colors are are like more bright and nice which is good in terms of like getting visual distinctiveness um shortcuts runs on the apple watch now too. And you can save not just the shortcuts icon, but individual shortcut icons as complications. And then you tap them and it runs that shortcut, which is pretty awesome.

There's a new date picker on iOS and iPadOS. So the scrolling wheel is gone and it's been replaced by a calendar, which you can just tap the date of, and then you tap and change the time by typing them in as numbers. I absolutely love this. This was something that I didn't know I wanted until I had it. The UI that has been around on the iPhone for so long of picking dates and times, that has definitely grown old. And, you know, we saw this with Catalyst, right? They brought it with Mac Catalyst to the Mac,

and it was a bad idea. And I would assume that in thinking about that, they've also rethought the way that date pickers should be done on iOS and iPadOS, and it's way nicer. Yeah, you only see the spinning wheel on if you, so the date picker is a month. And then if you need to choose a different month or year, that's a spinning wheel, at least on the iPad it is. That works. But the primary interface doesn't have the spinning wheel in it anymore.

So it's not just on Catalyst, but on iPad, and it's good. All right, so what else do we have? Oh, HomePod is getting third-party music service support. Not a lot of information about this. This was on the big bubble slide thing, and I missed it during the keynote. But it was one of those little things in the word cloud, which were much more visual this year, which is a third-party music support. So you would assume this is one of those little things in the word cloud, which were much more visual this year, just a third party music support. So you would assume this is one of the couple of things that Apple is doing to probably try and combat against antitrust complaints. So, you know, we spoke about email and browsers.

You'll be able to choose default on iOS and iPadOS. And now you'll be able to presumably change your music service to Spotify or something like that with the upcoming version of HomePodOS or whatever it's called. Yeah, it's good. The HomePod is still a product in their lineup. It's good. The U1 chip finally has a purpose. Two purposes, even. product in their lineup it's good uh the u1 chip finally has a purpose um two two purposes two purposes uh one of them was uh the car key stuff right i think when i mentioned that in the keynote but there's been a session about that yeah there's a session i watched it it's a german man who tells you about uh who assumes that you're a car company it's like this this presentation is for the car manufacturer so i'm like nope it's for me

i am going it isn't werner herzog but it is a german fellow who works at apple and uh which i think is funny of course the car presentation is from a german guy um but it is as they mentioned in the keynote the near term for car key is nfc so it's like apple pay and this is the there's a spec. There's like a car connectivity consortium, I think is the name of it. And Apple is part of it, but it's a consortium. So it's car makers and tech people, tech companies.

And it is trying to come up with a standard so you can use your phone as a car key. That's the bottom line. How do you do that? And the version 2.0 standard that's out there now is NFC. So this BMW that they talked about that lets you do car key stuff this fall, that's NFC, which means that you have to hold your phone up to the door and then it unlocks. And then you have to put your phone in an NFC cradle basically on the dash and then

you can start the car. And that's because NFC, you've got to be very close and they've got to have your verification, right? You can't, just getting into the car and then that's it, you shouldn't be able to start the car. So they need to have multiple NFC readers. It's not ideal, but they're working on this 3.0 spec

from the Car Connectivity Consortium that's based on UWB, ultra-wideband, which is the U1 chip. And so that next wave of cars will support that. And that you don't have to even take your phone out of your pocket or purse or anything because UWB lets you do precision location. And so it knows you're by the door and it unlocks the door and then it knows your phone's inside the car and it'll let you start the car so even though they made this initial announcement and it's about nfc in the car key session for auto manufacturers only please um they they made it very clear that that uwb is

where this is going and um and you know are you going to be able to buy a car with ultra wide band in it tomorrow? No. But next year or the year after, these will start to roll out. And this is one of those things where Apple makes an announcement now and you're like, okay, but it doesn't impact my life now. But if you buy a car five years from now, kind of like the rollout of CarPlay, five years from now, you will probably have an ultra wideband thing in your car. That will be your car key and you won't need a car key anymore. Your phone is your car key. And once you do that, you can do things like share your car key with other people. And this session talks about all the security that they go through,

all the cryptographic key exchanges and endorsements and things that happen in the background so that you can send your friend your car key and say you know don't put a scratch on it here's the key and and you can do all sorts of stuff like that you can send them and then you can de-auth them and you can control them and it's very cool and ultra wideband is a part of that they also announced with a with another session called the nearby interaction framework so this allows developers to be able to use the U1 chip to kind of tell if devices are close to each other. So Apple are now opening this up.

They've got an API, so you'll be able to do things to tell how far apart different devices are. This could be used for games. It could be used for many other purposes, I guess. But it's good to see that they're opening this up because it will actually bring more use cases for this technology for applications that believe that they can use it, which is good because, as we've made many jokes in the past, like Apple put this chip in their devices. I mean, to their credit, they didn't really talk about it a lot, but they've put this chip in their devices and it's not doing anything right now um so it's cool to see that they put this in there and i guess the

good thing about it is is when they do have stuff start coming out for this later this year they will then apple will be on their second generation of devices that has these chips in it which is better than what they have done this type of stuff in the the past, where it's like, hey, new device has this. You have to get your new device, right? So it's cool. They'll have a wider install base for this technology. And it may be that this goes to other devices. In the car key thing,

they specifically mentioned Apple Watch, which they haven't said anywhere else that NFC should work with the Apple Watch for car key. thing they specifically mentioned apple watch which they haven't said anywhere else that nfc should work with the apple watch for car key uh the problem with the car key is it'll let you in but unless you take your watch off and lay it down in the dash it won't actually work but a future apple watch could have a u1 or other ultra wide band built into it and at that point you know you literally don't need anything but just walk up to your car and it unlocks for you because you've got your watch on um and then you can start the car because you've got your watch on so they'll they'll get there but

i think that's the question because there's no nfc in ipad for example so will there be a u1 and a future ipad or not it's unclear but the idea that the the um the location interaction stuff which is a fun session where a guy has an app where it's like a monkey that changes depending on how close you get. And at the end of it, he goes all the way to the far end of the room and gives a thumbs up because he's found the other phone. I enjoy that session actually a lot. But I don't know what the application for that is. But it is cool that third parties get access to that stuff. Because otherwise, it was just that weird airdrop feature that nobody used. And there's been some information about new boot and recovery modes for Apple Silicon

Max. Can you tell me what this is all about? Yeah. So they changed everything about this. We're going to get back to this, but like the Apple Silicon Max is an opportunity for Apple to change a lot of things that have just been the way they've been for a long time on Mac, sometimes because they have to build it again. Like the bootloader here, they're essentially, I think, using the iPhone, iPad bootloader. So they're using iPhone and iPad

tech. So they have to say, okay, well, how do we want new Macs to boot? How do we want them to boot? And we're going to have to build it because we aren't going to use the old system. We have to say, okay, well, how do we want new Macs to boot? How do we want them to boot? And we're going to have to build it because we aren't going to use the old system. We have to build a new system. So it forces them kind of like the iPad pointer. Actually, it forces them to do a modern take on what Mac users expect from startup. And you may say to yourself, I don't expect anything from startup. I just want my computer to start up. But think about all of those keyboard shortcuts

that all your friends ask you about when they're desperate, which is like, how do I get to recovery mode? How do I zap the PRAM? How do I boot off an external drive? How do I get to single user mode? They probably don't ask that, but it's pretty cool.

And the answer is always like different keyboard shortcuts and stuff. And that's all part of the boot process. Yeah, like restart the Mac whilst holding command. And it's always one of these things where you need to be able to look it up to do it. But what if the device that you need to look it up on is the one you now can't boot properly? So having a kind of, and it's kind of i think these days everybody knows you have a problem with your device just whatever you do to turn it off hold

that and something will happen so this is the this is the new system so the new system they built forget about all those keyboard shortcuts you hold down the power button on startup which is great and on on laptops it's that touch id button it is essentially the power button on startup, which is great. And on laptops, it's that touch ID button. It is essentially the power button. Presumably on desktops, it will literally be the power button, just, you know, not on a keyboard, just the button, you hold it down. And what will happen is it will come up with something that looks very much actually like if you hold down option today, it's kind of a black background with your bootable disks visible on the screen, but there's also a gear icon for other options. And then that's, that's recovery mode you're in right then. And you can choose at that

point to go to other options. You can run the disk utility. You can do a, an internet restore of Mac OS. If you're, if your version of Mac OS is messed up, like all of it is rolled into that. What's interesting about this is that also means that they had to add support for multiple bootable drives to the bootloader. Because if you think about it, you can't install two versions of iPadOS on an iPad and choose from startup disk which one to boot from, right? There's only one on the iPhone and the iPad. There's only one. on the iPhone and the iPad. There's only one. But Mac users expect to be able to have this version here and another version there or two separate installs and be able to boot from one externally and the other one internally and all that stuff. And Apple has built all that stuff

in. So it's another example of Apple kind of like putting together a new take on what Mac users expect because they had to build it again in 2020. What does that look like in 2020? Instead of the thing that they kind of built up over the course of 20 years, it's their new take on it. And that goes to, you know, like, like recovery is an example where on current Macs, you have your boot partition, and then you have like the secret recovery partition. And if that isn't there, then you just have to do internet recovery. Well, apparently, on this version, there's your boot partition, your recovery partition, and then there's like the super secret emergency partition.

And that one will boot if the other ones fail and it can then restore and start off that process. So there's more kind of cached away that isn't on the internet now, but still, you know, it'll get you back up and running. Anyway, it's very interesting. I'm sure more details will come out, but anybody who supports Macs, whether it's as a profession or with their friends and family, this is going to change how we do that. I hope for the better because, you know, it's much more straightforward, right? You can just say, hold down the power button. Okay, now you're going to see this screen,

click on the gear, click on this, right? And you'll be able to walk people through everything like that. Oh, and target mode, which is a popular thing, you know, hold down command T when you start up, and your computer becomes a disk drive, right? That was always the, it was originally like the Firewire target disk mode, and then it just became regular old target mode. The idea there is like, you hold down that key command, your computer is now a hard drive, you plug it into another computer, you can see the contents of the hard drive. They changed that as well. Now your computer becomes a server, becomes a file server. So you go into the options and you choose sharing mode or disk sharing mode or something like that. And basically, in recovery, it becomes an SMB server.

So if you want to evacuate files off of it, now you can do that. You don't even need a cable, because presumably it's on your local network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and you can just connect to it in recovery mode and helicopter the files off that you need. So lots of rethinking of what we think of as sort of traditional Mac features that they've had to re-implement and they've done it in a modern way rather than just having it be a copy of what was there before for Intel. And I think the last thing I wanted to mention today was I think what many people agreed on was one of the most entertaining session videos of everything that came out from WWDC, which was designed for the iPadOS pointer. This is a fascinating session, which is mostly pretty

high level talking about design and design decisions about from, I'm assuming this is the team that created and developed the iPadOS pointer. For sure. It's four individuals who each go through different considerations that they made about kind of what the iPadOS pointer is doing at a conceptual level, why they decided to make it look the way that it did, how you can design custom pointers and how they should interact. This thing is absolutely fantastic and fascinating session that I recommend everybody watch i agree it is a great session it was my favorite session of the week and it is mostly not technical in the in the

way that you're thinking a developer session would be it's you know because there are developer sessions where they get into the code and i keep hitting the 15 second skip button because it doesn't it's not gonna yeah Yeah, don't watch the, I think it's called build for iPadOS pointer. That's very technical, different type of things. It's designed for iPadOS pointer. So if you appreciate design, whether you're a designer or not,

if you appreciate design or you appreciate finding out how the thing you use works and the principles behind it, if you like sort of taking apart or understanding better what's going on, whether or not you use the iPadOS pointer, but if you have, then you've experienced this

and you're like, why is this different? What decisions did they make? Because it very much, like I said, about all the boot stuff, this is reinventing the pointer. This is literally saying, okay, in 1984, the pointer was invented for a certain purpose and we're essentially using the same one now.

But in 2020, what do we want it to be? And there's some fascinating things in there about, like, degrees of precision and why it's a circle and not an arrow and how it changes. And it's really a great session. I highly recommend it for anyone who cares about design functionality or just understanding why stuff works the way it does i also just wanted to note um two pieces of follow-out for two interviews that craig was involved with uh one was uh i will recommend people go and watch the youtube video that mkbhd made which was content that was cut out of his podcast interview. So he also released a longer interview

on his Waveform podcast with Craig Federighi, but then did a kind of edited version, which I really liked the presentation of this. It was like a video of responding to kind of his viewers, their comments, the things that they weren't sure about, the things they wanted more information on.

And it was like Marques would kind of set up a point and then go to ask Craig what it was and get Craig's input on it. It was a really nicely done video, obviously. It's Marques Brownlee, right? So it's perfectly done, really well done. The podcast interview itself on the Waveform podcast is also interesting because Marques and Craig actually talk about how the production was done for the keynote.

So obviously Marques is interested in that kind of stuff. So that's also really good, and I recommend that as well. But the video itself, if you just want to spend 20 minutes or whatever, it's really nicely done. So I recommend that. And then, of course, I mean, I'm sure everybody here has probably already seen the talk show with Craig, Vetterigian and Jaws, right? Was was was John Gruber's guests this year. So it's a video version again, and Craig and Jaws are at Apple Park. And I assume that John Gruber's in his home office. Yes, or a location. It's a very nice location. I suspect it's not his actual office, but rather a nice background chosen.

But maybe it is. Maybe his office actually normally looks like that. I don't know. So yeah, obviously go watch those too too but i just wanted to mention in case people hadn't seen them yet because they're also really good for giving a little bit more background more information and videos nice too all right this episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at bombus june is pride. And while this year's celebrations are a little bit different than usual for some, there are still ways that we can all come together to support the LGBTQ plus community. And Bombus is doing that with their new pride collection. These

colorful socks bring more love, compassion and comfort into the world because they also give back to those experiencing homelessness in the LGBTQ plus community. Jason, I think that you got a set of these, right, from Bombas? Well, I want to tell you, I got a whole package of Bombas socks and it made a whole collection of people happy because it was all of their different styles. So like my friend Tom, who is a runner, got the like the low socks that don't go above your ankle. And he told me he loves them. And this was not a he was not compensated in any way.

He was like, oh, I just ran with those yesterday. They're so great. I love them. And I said, well, you can get more at Bombas. I got a really cushy set of blue socks that I love that are super nice and that I've been loving wearing. My daughter took the pride socks away, which are super rainbowy. And she's been wearing those and she thinks they're awesome too. And I think my wife took a set, the fourth set and likes those too. So essentially we made a whole community happy, including my friend, Tom, the runner

with the Bomba socks. And yeah, my daughter immediately basically took the Pride socks and was like, I want them, I want them, I want them. And they were gone. So she is very discerning in terms of her clothing and her style. And she rolls her eyes at lots of podcast products that come into our house, but not those socks. Definitely not. So you should go and check them out for yourself. These things are fantastic. For every pair of colorful pride socks that you buy,

Bombas will donate a pair to somebody in need in the LGBTQ plus community. The designs are wonderful. There's some cool tie dye designs. I know Jason's a fan of tie dye too. So they have those. They also have a set called bright miles, which look really nice as well. Pride is usually a time when we can all come together but because many pride events were cancelled this year it's more important than ever to find new ways to show support and give back to

a community you can go to bombas.com upgrade right now and shop the pride collection and get 20% off your first order that's b-o-m-b-a dot com slash upgrade. Our thanks to Bombas for their support of Upgrade and all of RelayFM. Correct. So we're going to move into now our interview with Bob Borchers and Ronak Shah from Apple's product marketing team. We're going to be talking about macOS Big Sur. We're going to be talking about Safari. As we mentioned, this interview was conducted last week, and we hope that you really enjoy it. Here it is. So I wanted to start this by actually talking about Safari because obviously Safari is a massively important part of any

version of macOS. It's probably for many people the app that they have open all day every day they do most of their work in but this year Safari and Big Sur has a ton of new features. I think Craig called it the biggest update ever during the keynote. And I really wanted to try and understand from your perspective, why is that? I think that Craig is absolutely right. This is the biggest release of Safari that we've done really since we first introduced it. And it starts with a lot of the hallmark features that people have come to know and love around Safari. Things like industry-leading performance. We're improving JavaScript performance,

continue to lead the industry there. We have industry-leading battery life. So we're delivering this amazing performance, letting you browse and stream video longer than other popular browsers. We're upping the ante on privacy. We have a pioneering track record on protecting user privacy in Safari. And this year with the privacy report, we're raising awareness around how Safari protects you and making it really easy for users

with a click of a button to see what trackers are being blocked as they browse the web, which is really cool. We're also improving extensions. And so now we're going to support the new web extension API. So this whole range of extensions that are out there, developers are going to be able to easily bring those to Safari. And we're even shipping tools in Xcode to make it really easy for developers to do that. And once they've done it, we built an all new category on the Mac App Store to showcase those extensions with editorial and top charts so users can discover those great extensions and start using them, which is awesome.

And then in addition to all of that, we have a whole set of additional features, everything from the customizable start page that lets you add new types of content like the reading list or your iCloud tabs, lets you customize your background image to an all new tab design that's more space efficient, that allows you to see your favicons by default. It's really awesome. And then we built in translation right into Safari too. So now as you browse the web and come across a site that you want to translate, we've got

a really elegant experience to do that. So just a huge release of Safari this year. We think users are going to love it. So let's maybe hit those really quickly in turn. In terms of the privacy, you showed it. There's some judgment that's going to happen when you visit a site to help users understand sort of what's going on behind the scenes, which I think it's really interesting. I think it's definitely in fitting with sort of Apple's approach to security and privacy on the web. Talk a little bit about the thought process of getting a little more in users' faces with disclosure about what their web browser is doing

and what their sites they're visiting are doing when they visit them? Sure. So we've been doing this on the user's behalf for a while now. We first introduced intelligent tracking prevention in 2017. And so we've been blocking this type of third-party tracking for a while now. We want to raise awareness and let users know that this is happening and give them information that makes them more aware of the tracking that's being attempted as they browse the web. And so with a click, they can see the trackers that are attempting to track them on the current website, or they can get even more information and see those trackers for the past 30 days. And I think, Ronik, as well, when you were talking about extensions, that's another great place where I don't think consumers know enough about the potential risks that you have with extensions.

They're incredibly powerful, right? And they do some amazing things, and developers have been phenomenally creative with them. But they also introduce some privacy risks that I think are really important for us and others to educate users about so that they know, hey, with this great power comes some risk. And we have a responsibility to help people see that. And one of the things that we're doing there is when you enable extension for the first time, and you go to a site and you want to use it, when you click, we'll ask you how much access you want to give to that extension, whether you want to give access just to the site, just for the day, or if you want the extension

to be able to access anything that you browse. And so we think it's really important to be able to give that users that level of control as they use extensions. And by the way, I am definitely going to be using that recipe extension that Beth showed in the keynote. That is just phenomenal. Oh my God. Yeah. My wife turned to me when we were watching it and said, I want this because every website has like paragraphs upon paragraphs of text before they actually show the recipe. I didn't know we were going to talk about search engine optimization

in cooking blogs, but oh boy, yes, absolutely. I'm right there with you. They all know what they're doing, but I don't like it. It's kind of user hostile. I want to talk about extensions too. I'm a Safari user everywhere. And yet there are certain things where I have the stuff that I do in Chrome. And a lot of it has to do with some very specific extensions. So I was excited by this. It seems to me, I don't know a lot about browser extension development,

but it sounds like most of the extensions that are out there that are based on Chromium. So, you know, I know Firefox, but also Chrome comes from that. Is the idea here that it shouldn't be a complete rewrite or anything like that for these extensions to come over? That because you're using this specific format, that the developers of those extensions will fairly quickly be able to bring them up on Safari? That's right. In a lot of cases, developers won't have to make any changes at all. They'll simply need to use the tools to package up their extension, and they'll be able to publish those to the App Store directly. In some cases, developers will have to make some minor modifications, but we expect that Chrome and Firefox extension developers are going to have a pretty straightforward time bringing these extensions to Safari, getting them on the Mac Store, and having all of our users be able to download and use them.

And, Ronik, isn't a lot of that functionality built into Xcode 12? That's right. And so we're shipping tools in Xcode 12 that make all of that really seamless, that can automatically package up these extensions in formats that are used by other browsers. So developers have a really streamlined process to do all of this. And a lot of those extensions that I'm using, I'm using on one website where I'm using them, you know, one session, and then I don't use them again for another month. And I like the idea that I can say, okay, now I'm using you and know that when I go to that browser a week later, it's not sitting there loading, you know, reading every single page. I can just have it on when I want and then it goes away, which is nice.

Yeah, we think users are going to love that. It's going to give you control and it's just a really nice way to know exactly what extensions can access. I actually wanted to follow up on the privacy stuff that you were saying, Runeck, like that you obviously at Apple have been seeing and have been able to keep a track of a lot of the trackers and the stuff

that's been following around people on the web. But with the new Safari features, it brings them to the forefront for people. There's a shield icon in the toolbar, which people can tap and they can see about the trackers. Do you think that this level of putting it in front of people's faces will educate them more in that they may then start to demand change from the websites that they visit?

We hope so. I mean, certainly we want to, part of this is raising awareness for users. Part of it is also, we're also doing in the hope that users will demand more. And if that's where this goes, I think that that's great. And if it also means that users expect more, not just from the sites they visit, but from the browsers that they use, that's great too. We want this not only to be about raising awareness, but also hopefully to help push the industry forward in terms of how users get tracked on the web. Yeah. And I think if you look at the privacy principles that Craig outlined at the very

beginning of the section in the keynote, there were four. And the last one, and the one we've been really focused on, is about transparency and control. It is about knowing what is happening that then allows you to demand and to take control. And when people think about privacy, they understand that there's a risk there, but they don't necessarily know what to do about it. And what we really want to do is to bring some of these things to the fore so they can become more educated, they can become more demanding, they can demand of all of us to do better. And that only starts when you actually know about what's going on. And that's why that transparency kind of pillar is so critical to privacy in so many different places. Another part of privacy and security when it comes to the web is passwords. Can we talk a

little bit about some of the password functionality that's in the new version of Safari? Absolutely. So in addition to monitoring unwanted tracking, we're also this year securely monitoring your saved passwords. And one of the really cool things that we can do now is securely detect if one of your saved passwords is involved in a data breach.

And we use a cryptographic derivation of your password. So Apple doesn't get your password information, but we can compare that derivation against lists of breached passwords. And if your password is involved in a data breach, we can alert you and we make it really easy to upgrade to a securely generated password that's more secure. So that's what I was going to ask is, you're not just looking at like sources that were breached.

You're looking at, did my password get leaked in a data breach, my specific password. That's right. And we can do that in a secure way where we don't get that information, but we can make the comparison and let you know. So we're super excited to be releasing that this year, both on macOS and iOS as well. From a user perspective, do they see that when they go to log into that website again, or is there kind of a different flow where it alerts people as soon as it's been found out? So we'll actually notify you if we detect that your password's been in a data breach,

and we also alert you in the password settings as well. I wanted to ask about page translation because we all get the idea, right? I go to a page that is in a language I don't have in my list of languages. And so I don't understand it. And this is always, I will tell you, it is always somebody sending me to an amazing investigative report on obvious, which is now Safari can translate that page, which is great. I'm curious, sort of like how, how does this work? Is it all happening on device? What is happening on device? There's obviously language detection going on.

Is that looking at the webpage, literally saying I'm serving you German, or are you looking at the text on the webpage and detecting that it's German? And then is it going over the internet to do that translation or is it doing it on device? The way it works is that we actually do all of the language detection on device. So as you browse, we can detect what language the website that you're visiting is in. And if a user decides that they want to use translation, we actually send the contents of the page, the text to an Apple server. It's not tied to your Apple ID. And that information is translated on our server. That text is stored entirely in memory. We don't store it on disk at all. We do

the translation, send it back to Safari, and then we discard that information on the server side so that you get that translation information back to you. Great. Safari also receives a lot of design refinements. You know, you were mentioning about, especially to like the star page and stuff like that, which I think kind of leads into talking about Big Sur in general. Huge design changes for macOS. Why now for a lot of this stuff?

Like what about 2020? What about this version of macOS felt like the right time to start taking a look at what macOS looks like again. Yeah, you know, it's a situation where we make design changes very carefully and thoughtfully because they have such huge ramifications. In many cases, we're talking about updating hundreds of millions of devices, and we carry that responsibility with a lot of weight and concern. And what we want to do is we want to look at each of the platforms that we have and look for ways in which we can better match the capabilities of that platform together with the design and

bring those components together. And as we were looking at macOS and macOS Big Sur, we really felt like there was an opportunity here to use the palette of the operating system and use the entire beautiful, large display that Macs have to give you better access, faster access to your content and bring that forward in a way. And so when you see things like the translucent menu bar, when you see kind of the layering of the different menu items and elements, that's really to bring what's most important to the fore and let the other pieces be available, but also be standing just slightly back. And if you look at that great film that Alan did in the keynote, I think you get a real sense of that because he's talking about how these layers are being created and put up almost in 3D and thinking about, okay, how do you prioritize those pieces?

want to balance that with a degree of familiarity. So somebody who is coming from a different device, coming across to the Mac, for example, we want them to be able to be instantly comfortable, but at the same time, make sure that we're doing things that are kind of authentic to the platform. A great case in point are the icons on the dock. If you look at them, look at the mail icon, for example, it's instantly familiar. But if you zoom in, it's got the craft and the care and the beauty that Mac icons have been known for since the beginning. You know, zoom in and you'll see embossed in the back of the envelope is Apple Park, Cupertino, California, right? It's those thoughtful touches that provide the continuity and kind of help people understand, you know, the Mac is still a Mac and it's amazing, but we're also providing a degree of familiarity with these other platforms while at the same time advancing kind of the design purpose that's within

macOS Big Sur. So we think it's a phenomenal design update. We think people are going to love it and just excited for people to get their hands on it. The dock icons are kind of a perfect metaphor, I think, for what's happening in Big Sur, where, as you say, there is an element for the UI design in bringing consistency, but not forgetting what the Mac is, what its history is, where it's come from, by going to those levels, to putting in little Easter eggs, to just really having those icons be much more detailed than their counterparts on iOS, which speaks to the fact that macOS is macOS. Yeah. And it's beyond even just the visual approach, right? If you go and look at what we've done with sounds, you know, the Mac is a platform. If you look at the latest generation of

hardware, the audio ability of the Mac Mac both to record and playback is phenomenal. And it created a great opportunity to kind of rethink and reimagine some of the sounds. And we've gone and created very familiar but slight riffs off of things that we've had for many, many years, and even done things like bring back the boot chime as a way to signal, hey, this, yes, this is a new Mac OS with Mac OS Big Sur, but it stands on the shoulders of kind of the great leaps in the operating system to date. It definitely feels momentous. We've got not only my favorite thing, which is version numbers, where we go to version 11, but you've got the Apple Silicon coming in with those Macs, and you've got this design refresh. It definitely

feels it's been 20 years since OS X started, really. It does feel like this is sort of almost like a generational change. It does feel like it's the biggest visual refresh for sure since Aqua or since sort of Aqua got muted, but it's been a long time. So it all feels like this is a good time for change because everything is changing to a certain degree. Yeah, I think there is a moment in time where you want to kind of move things forward in a significant way. And this is that moment in time. Now, that being said, if you look at it,

our operating systems actually have kind of two levels of names, right? There is macOS Big Sur, which is following the tradition of California locations. And by the way, I think Big Sur is the perfect name for this because anybody who's visited Big Sur knows it's this amazing combination of power and beauty. And that I think really is appropriate for this release. And we've continued that tradition going from Catalina now to Big Sur. But then the version number, which speaks really significantly to the developer community, is where we have also signaled this is a big moment in time by going from version 10 to version 11 and really helping people, you know, if they didn't

already know, it's time to kind of sit up and take notice. Obviously, every year is a big year for the Mac, this one included. As well as being a Mac professional, like I record and edit all my shows on Macs, I'm also a big iPad professional as well. And I use the iPad quite a lot. And one of the things that I was really excited about with the whole keynote as a whole is seeing how there are elements of iPad OS design and the new Mac OS design that seem to be kind of coexisting and moving along together. Is that a consideration now that these two platforms are kind of becoming a little bit closer in their visual consistency to try and help maybe bridge the gap for people like me that work on both platforms? I'd say functionality. Let's throw that in there too. I mean, obviously, added keyboard

and pointer support. But then when I see, for example, a lot of people have said, oh, the Mac in Big Sur looks a lot more like the iPad. But as somebody who's written a book about photos, like the sidebar in photos on the iPad, I'm like, I know where that came from, right? That's learning lessons from the Mac and applying them to the iPad. When you talk about that and you throw in Mac Catalyst, it definitely seems like the Mac and the iPad are learning from each other more than ever. Yeah, and I think people should expect that, right? And just go look at widgets, for example, which are phenomenal, that are inspired by a lot of what we've learned with the watch in terms of creating glanceable UIs and ways in which you can visually get access to information very quickly and clearly. And so we want to take those learnings.

But again, coming back to my previous point, we want to do it in a way that is specific and authentic for the platform that we're designing for. So it's not like, oh, that's a great feature. Let's just go copy paste it over here. I mean, we haven't talked about it. But if you look at Control Center on the Mac, obviously, that's a construct that we've had elsewhere. But the way that we've brought it to the Mac is uniquely suited to the Mac. You can tear off controls and put them into the menu bar. You can dive down and get more fine-grained controls. It is really well suited for the Mac. If you look at messages, a simple example, but yes, we've brought over great features from iOS 14, like being able to pin

conversations and having inline replies. And now you can edit emoji and those things. But we've also added keyboard shortcuts. Multiple windows. And yeah, windows, exactly. Maps is a perfect example of that. You know, bring up three windows within Maps. So you've got one for reading about the great guides for a location

you're going to, another one for the route, and another one for look around. I mean, what else, Roenick? What else comes to mind? I mean, multiple windows. If you want to get really into the details, I mean, look at some of the things that we've done with popovers in Messages so that you can get to all of these new features. You know, we've been able to use Catalyst to not only bring over new features that we introduced in Messages on iOS this year, we were able to bring over features like effects and the photo picker, emoji stickers that people have been wanting for a really long time. And we've been able to do that using Mac-style controls, Mac-style checkboxes, Mac-style popovers that look and work great. I've been wanting to see lasers and messages

on my Mac for a while now, so I'm very much looking forward to that. Is there a conversation? How does the conversation work in terms of you've got teams working on the Mac who are bringing, for example, messages and maps over using Mac Catalyst, new versions that are coming from the iPad using Mac Catalyst. And there are also the people who are working on Mac Catalyst, And there are also the people who are working on Mac Catalyst on the tools that all developers have to use to effect this move from iPad to the Mac.

How does that work? Do those teams, are they collaborating in a development cycle like this? Are they collaborating all the time? Does the Maps team call up the Catalyst team and say, we really need to do this thing? Can you make this work for us? to do this thing? Can you make this work for us? I'm just, I'm curious how that conversation goes on because the truth is that two major system apps on Mac OS are completely relying on Mac Catalyst now. And so obviously Mac Catalyst needed to be capable of doing the job. Yeah. And I think when we, you know, if you go back to when we introduced a Mac Catalyst, the goal was to be able to get people who had built amazing iPad apps and had

that code base to get them to come across to the Mac and be able to spend their time really finely tuning it for the Mac experience. And in the intervening time, we have done nothing but listen to external and internal developers as to the kinds of things that they wanted to have and felt would be most useful and effective, and then have added that in. And if you look at this release of Mac Catalyst, it's huge. I mean, the number of additional capabilities that have been added in is phenomenal. And they can now take advantage of, you know, accessing essentially every pixel on the Mac, they can take advantage of universal purchase, all of the controls that Ronik was talking about. So that inspiration and that drive comes from wanting to have the best apps possible on the Mac for developers coming from any direction. And that includes both the internal teams as well as the external teams.

It makes sense. Last year, I talked to a lot of developers who, because there was so much enthusiasm over releasing SwiftUI, which is understandable, there was also this question of sort of like, well, what about Mac Catalyst? And sort of Mac Catalyst last year was making good on the promise of the year before. So we're going back multiple WWDCs now. But I know that they all had their lists, right, of here are the things that I want my Mac Catalyst to do. And they were all pretty enthusiastic because it is quite an endorsement. I was talking to somebody today who said, well, when you see major Mac apps from Apple brought over on Mac Catalyst, it seems like a pretty solid endorsement for using Mac Catalyst. So I think they're enthusiastic seeing Apple,

what Apple can do with messages and maps. Well, yeah. and I think the real proof point here is go use those two applications. And they are just phenomenal for all the reasons Ronik just mentioned. And at the end of the day, we are one company, right? So the fact that this should be a great combination of efforts and be the best representation of what you can do with Mac Catalyst is what you should expect of us.

What do you think are some of the key areas that developers should be focusing on to make sure that their apps are going to look at home on Big Sur? So there are a number of things that if they're using the modern frameworks built within Xcode and within the operating system, if they're using the modern frameworks, they'll actually get a lot of the pieces and the components for free, as it were. And they will get the standard treatments and they'll have access to a number of the capabilities that we've been talking about that will make macOS Big Sur really what it is.

And I think one of the ones we were talking about earlier is, in fact, the icon. We have provided some guidelines, some suggestions for how to fit within kind of a standard framework, but then to be able to be creative within it. And I think it's actually, all you have to do is be a user and go look at your doc. You can almost sometimes gauge

when the app was last updated based on the modernity of its icon. And so I actually think one of the things people should do is once they get their app incredibly performant and doing all the things that you would want to, also go look and see, you know, what does your front door look like? And does it represent kind of the visual approach and the treatment and the fresh way in which we've created our own icons and think about how they want to be represented in that same format. It's almost like marketing in a way as well, really, isn't it?

Because as well, especially if these apps are going to be in the Mac App Store, it will help them stand out, I'm sure. But it's an important part of an application. It's the identity of the application in many ways. Yeah, which is why, you know, going back to why we spent so much time thinking about the icons, um, that has been, you know, for a long, long time, that has been such an important part of how you represented what was inside this amazing application. Um, and, uh, and you need to approach it in a thoughtful way because, uh, users are discerning,

um, and you, and, and you take a lot away from what you see in that little rounded wreck that's sitting on the, on the homepage. Yeah. I have to own up to there being many apps that sometimes I feel like I can't use because of the icon thing where like, I'm like, I don't know if I can keep clicking on this. It's the icon shaming i can't help it actually personality of apps goes beyond this this just strikes me one of the features in big sur is this idea that apps can set their own kind of signature color and so you can

have a user can say i want to be in you know i want everything to be orange or blue or whatever but the default is this multi-color mode which lets every app in addition to their icon and everything else about them, lets them sort of have their color, which I think is a really interesting little quirky thing about letting every app express itself. And that goes for Apple's apps that are on the system. But it also goes for every third party app that they can say, well, we are going to be bold and red or we're going to be a light blue or whatever. And it makes those apps potentially feel even more homey,

for lack of a better word. Like it's part of the app identity along with the icon. Yeah, and I also think it serves a real functional purpose too, which is especially today with the Mac being so powerful and us doing so many different things within the Mac and having multiple windows up, one of the things you want to do is very quickly be able to figure out which window you need to go to. And if you've got a little glimpse of color that you've kind of put in the back of your head

that, oh, blue is male, it's, you know, it's a great cue that a great cue that serves not only a way, I love the way you put it, that shows off some of the personality of the app, but it also serves a functional purpose so that I can go get that and recognize it and kind of start to build some of the muscle memory. It builds, it creates an order to all these things. So yeah, I'm excited to see how people are going to,

how they're going to use it and what it's going to start to look like. It's funny that you say about blue being male. I feel like every third party mail app I've ever seen uses blue and white for its icon. And I'm sure that that all goes back to the Apple standard mail app, right? Like that's where that comes from. Yeah. Yeah. No, they, they, yeah. And it is funny how that color memory is so, so strong for you. Yeah. Okay, so we've got developers

receiving beta as a big sir now. Apple has announced that there will be, as there has been the last few years, public beta forthcoming in July. Beta cycle, obviously, it's for people who want to try the new stuff out before it's ready to go for the masses. It's also a feedback cycle and every beta version comes with a feedback assistant.

What kind of feedback do you expect to get and are you looking for as part of the beta process, whether it's from users or developers? And does that get incorporated? I mean, what we see today in the developer release is not necessarily a done deal about the final release. There's going to be stuff that Apple kind of learns and recognizes based on user feedback and adjusts along the way, right? So we spend a ton of time going through the feedback that we get. It's the whole reason that we do the public beta. We want people using it and we want to get feedback from everything from technical bugs and issues to feedback on

the features themselves. And like I said, we have teams that spend a lot of time going through that feedback, identifying things that we need to spend more time on, pay attention to. And that feedback ends up in the final product. When we ship it in the fall, there are so many things that we've incorporated from that that help make the release better. And so I can't remember when we started doing public betas a few years ago, but it's become a really important part of our process as we develop the software and refine it in the final months before release. So if something doesn't look right or doesn't make sense or doesn't work right for somebody using the beta, they need to get out that feedback assistant and send that feedback to Apple because you've got people looking at that all summer. That's right. And we want to hear about it.

And we've actually made a lot of improvements to the feedback assistant itself to make that process even easier so that it's really easy for users to send us that feedback because that's incredibly valuable to us. We talked about Mac Catalyst a little bit. I want to at least bring this up. This is a little, I mean, it's big, sir, but it's slightly tangential as well, which is one of the announcements that I don't think a lot of us expected in the keynote was the idea that in addition to iPad app developers being able to bring their apps to the Mac using Mac Catalyst, that on Apple Silicon, apps that are for iPhone and iPad will be able to run natively inside Mac OS, which is, it's surprising, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about sort

of like how you view an app that's, you know, running in Big Sur that's Mac native developed using AppKit versus something developed using that catalyst versus something that we're now going to have another class of apps which are things coming over from the app store um you know how does that how does that work how does that look and do you think you know how do how do users react to that yeah wow a lot to unpack in one question it was a big it was a big moment yeah it was it was definitely a surprise and it was a mind-blowing moment. I was like, oh, okay, we're doing that too. Great.

Well, and I think, you know, just pulling back a second, if you look at it within the broader context, our goal with any transition, and especially with this upcoming transition to Macs with Apple Silicon, we want to make it seamless for developers and seamless for users. But we really want to start first with the developer community. And that's why it was really important for us to talk about Rosetta 2 and all of the amazing capabilities there as a transitional technology while you're getting your app ready to become a universal binary. So as a universal binary, you know, which you can generate

in Xcode 12, you have one single file that you can distribute that will run on both Intel based Macs, as well as Macs with Apple Silicon, and be able to kind of take that out to people that way. You saw all of the great additions to to Catalyst for people to be able to take their iPadOS or iOS code base and move that in. And on top of that, because we will have a, with Apple, Silicon will have a unified Silicon platform, we can also look at doing things like bringing those apps that are running on iOS or iPadOS over to the Mac. And what's great about it is that there will be there'll be a class of apps where the developer doesn't necessarily know yet whether to go invest the time in developing a Mac

version, but they want to get give their users access to the capability and creativity. And so they opt into to putting their their app into the Mac App Store. And by the way, this is all within the developer's control, right? They get to decide whether or not the app goes there. But then once it goes there, the user has access to it in the same way that they would on iOS or iPadOS. The developer can learn a ton and they can decide, okay, hey, maybe it's time for me to then go invest the time and let's use Mac Catalyst to get it into becoming more of a native Mac app. And let me start to build out that functionality because I see what people are doing with it. So we just think for developers, it's going to be a phenomenal way to extend the number of people that can make use of the creative work that

they've done and also enrich in kind of the Mac ecosystem so people can have access to some of the things that are going on on the other platforms. So, you know, at the end of the day, what's really important to us is that across all of these dimensions, that this transition is kind of seamless for both developers and users. And that's going to, you know, continue to be the focus as we move forward. Well, the fact is, so I use an iPad primarily when I'm traveling. And I think about what if I was using a Mac laptop, and there are certain iPad apps that I would really miss that aren't Mac apps. And I think about this scenario, and I think, well, now I can run those apps,

too. And then maybe eventually, there'll be something that gets brought over to Catalyst. Also, there are lots of places in my current Mac experience where the answer is we have an iOS app. And if you're on a Mac, you just need to use our website. And I love Safari. I already said it. But you know what? I love apps more than I love web pages. And I can see some of those. I can just really see the benefit, especially the ones that are using Flash, which is going to be deprecated in December. The benefit of being able to say, oh, I don't have to run that lousy website anymore. I can run their iPhone app or their iPad app, which is way better. So for me, part of this is the opportunity to move some stuff where I've got kicked to a lousy website and instead I get to

use a great app. That works for me. Yeah. And that's a great example, Jason, because it's, you know, there's real utility that you want to make use of. And sometimes these apps are coming from small development shops where they don't have a lot of time. But in this process, they'll come over and they'll have, provided that they've been using kind of modern frameworks, they'll have great native Mac capabilities along with them. So you won't feel like you're having to settle for something. It'll be like, oh my gosh, it's magic that this just happened. So yeah, we think it's going to be a great part of the overall story as we begin the the transition to max with apple silicon yeah for people who don't who didn't notice the file system stuff is the part that made me sit up and take notice where you know you open a file in an ipad app and you're opening your files on your mac it's just it just kind of happens and uh that's a beautiful thing because then you don't end up in a weird space where you're like wait a second second, how can I open files if I'm not on an iPad?

It just shows you your files on your Mac. It's nice. I like it. Yep. Glad you appreciate it. In so many ways, like so many of the ways that we've touched on, Big Sur really does feel like a Mac OS for now and the future. And I'm very excited about it myself. I couldn't agree more. And I think

I'm just excited for folks to be able to get access to Big Sur and start to explore it and see all of these kind of layers of story and technology and the fact that, you know, it just works the way that you would expect it to. I think it's really a powerful representation, as you say, about today, tomorrow, the future. And like I said, appropriately named Big Sur. Bob Ronak, I really, really want to thank you for both spending some time of Upgrade today. It's been absolutely wonderful to get your insight

and your thoughts on everything that you've got going on at the moment. Thank you. There's a lot in DubDub this year, and we really appreciate you guys investing the time to kind of unpack it with us. Thank you for having us. Yeah, it was a big week, wasn't it? It feels like it's been multiple weeks.

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no credit card required. Then when you sign up, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get an amazing 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. That was really great, wasn't it, Jason, that interview?

Yeah, it was great to talk to them and try to get some tidbits here and there while we're also getting there i i find a lot of this obviously they've got their marketing details that they're getting across but i like uh hearing from actual human beings who work at apple and getting their their take like sometimes it's not about the details but it's about the philosophy it's sort of of like, well, we think that this is, and so like asking them about running iOS and iPad apps on a Mac, like that's the kind of thing where they, you can get maybe a little sense of how Apple's approaching it from that, which I think is very helpful. So I'm very appreciative of those guys to take the,

take the time and sit down with us virtually from Apple park. Yeah. And what was a very busy week for them, I'm sure. So like having people available to talk to us was great. And I'm really thankful for the many, many, many people that were involved in making that happen. These things are quite a production, and I'm really happy that everything was able to come together. Yep. Now, Jason had a great idea for a topic today that we're going to talk about now. But when Jason was telling me about this topic, I thought to myself, this feels a little more than our usual topic.

This feels quite fun. Now, if you're new to Upgrade, every summer, things start to get a little slower in the news department. So we say to ourselves, and we said many years ago, we thought we would start coming up with some topics that aren't necessarily news related, aren't necessarily reporting about things, but we have a little bit more fun with them than we usually do. So we're doing something that nobody was expecting us to do, including ourselves right now. And we are transitioning right now into the summer of fun summer of fun it is happening in the middle of an episode and the summer of fun is now going to take us all the way through with

some cool vibes and fun vibes all the way through to maybe september maybe october who knows fun is right now the the calendar the summer of fun cannot be limited. It goes until it's done and then it leaves us and we can't control it. So what are we going to talk about for our first Summer of Fun segment this year, Jason Snow? Well, I wanted to do this and I didn't want to wait because I think everybody's going to be talking about it. So it just, again, the Summer of Fun forced its hand and said, I must happen now. We're going to build the apple silicon mac oh this is quite quite an important job we found ourselves taking care of here yeah well somebody's got to do it and it's going to be us because apple the only people doing it right now are at apple and they're

not talking so we're going to do it yeah the premise here is that um so back in the Intel transition 15 years ago, Apple just released the same Mac designs it had before. It was like trying to send a message of stability, right? It's like, it's okay. It's still an iMac. It just has an Intel processor in it now. And I feel like based on what we learned last week, this feels different. I'm starting to get this sneaking suspicion that Apple has been holding on to a lot of features because why implement that and go through like all the trouble of implementing this on the current hardware when they already have built it for iPad and iPhone, and they could just move it over once they're on Apple Silicon. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we'll

see that we could be wrong here. But I think it's worth pondering what Apple may have in reserve to roll out starting toward the end of this year in terms of new features and designs that are powered by Apple finally controlling the whole system on a chip and what they might bring in from the iPhone and the iPad. This is not a draft, but I think we could alternate and come up with whatever ones we think are most interesting and do it that way. So it feels a little like a draft, but it's not a draft because it's not a competition. We're just having fun listing things. A collaborative draft, as you will.

So yeah, I think this is a good idea and I like your setup here because I think you're right. I think there's probably a combination of things going on here. It could be a case of now that the fact that Apple are making their own chips, it's like there's stuff that they know how to do better if they're controlling it, or things that are just way easier for them to do. So they're going to get into some features that just wouldn't be easy for them to do whilst using Intel, because it requires a lot of other hardware and a lot of other chip design. But now that they're doing it on their own, it's like, well, we already have all these features in our iOS devices.

We know how to do that. Let's do it. But also the idea of if you have some really cool features on the way, don't blow them maybe. There is always – so you think about Apple, right? And we've just spoken to people. Marketing and product are intertwined there. And that is important to consider how sometimes there may be a decision that they make,

which is a product decision, a feature decision, but they make it at the right time because the marketing story fits, right? And that can go in both ways, but sometimes they might make tough decisions earlier than they need to because they want it for marketing reasons, right? So getting rid of 32-bit apps in Catalina may have been because when the Mac Silicon stuff comes around,

well, they can't run 32-bit apps anymore. So do that earlier than you need to so you can clear the decks and focus on what you want to for later on when you need it right kind of follow what i'm saying yep so let's talk about some of these features uh should we should we go in in almost like draft style but we have a little list here let's talk about that yeah i think it's we're making a list by alternating, but it's not a draft. Exactly.

One of the things that lots of people have wanted and they haven't done yet, and I think will be made easier by Apple kind of controlling the whole stack more is a cellular modem in a Mac or in a Mac laptop, especially. I can imagine this stuff being way easier for Apple to be able to produce when

they're in control of the whole thing because the chips that they make already integrate or have integrated modems in them uh and apple is continuing to move forward with future like 5g and stuff like that developing stuff on their own is something we've heard a lot of right and they acquired a bunch of stuff that they would need. They acquired Intel's chip business, right? Yeah, they bought Intel's modem business. It's true. So I can imagine a future Mac laptop.

I can't imagine the desktops getting them, but a future Mac laptop having integrated LTE or 5G. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it would make a lot of people happy. My gut feeling here is that since they're still currently using Qualcomm stuff, it's not going to happen in the short term. But once they are making their own cellular modem silicon, then I think it gets much more probable that they will do it. My question has been all along, you know, why not make cellular Macs? Why not do it? Why not just sell it for an extra $130 or whatever and put it in there?

And some of it is maybe the OS isn't really built to think about that traffic that way, and they would need to make some OS changes. But I remain frustrated that Apple doesn't let laptop users have the same option that iPad users have for cellular, because I love having cellular on my iPad, and I would not go back. So I would really like laptop users to be able to do that. And yes, you can tether and stuff like that. It's not as good. It's not as good as just popping a SIM card in and paying. In my case, I pay an extra $10 a month or something. And my iPad is just, if I'm somewhere without Wi-Fi, it just gives me data and it's fine.

And I love it. It's the best. What do you want to go with? Oh, I am going to go with ProMotion displays. This is something that we've had on ios devices and it's delightful the high resolution you know high screen rate of refresh makes smoothing super like scrolling super smooth and and and pleasant like the mac just doesn't do high frame rate right now. And iOS devices do. And I want that on the Mac.

Well, just the iPad. Yeah, I know. But although the iPhone should do it too. The iPhone needs promotion, right? We've talked about that. So the iPad does it now and I love it. And whenever I use an iPad that doesn't have it, I think, oh, oh no.

Like, oh no, that's not, like you can really tell it seems so small and yet it's actually really delightful. And why not do that on the Mac? That, you know, it's akin to like taking Retina to the Mac. Why would you not take ProMotion to the Mac as well? Because I think that high refresh rate screens and displays, they're starting to become table stakes in the technology industry.

And this is reminding me of Retina, but it's taken them longer to do it. It's like, this is a big screen technology. Apple had it for multiple years on the iPad Pro. I think that this year it's going to come to the iPhone, at least at the Pro, maybe the whole line, but probably the Pro for sure. Why not put it on the Mac as well? Because then, you know, ProMotion becomes a new part

of the Retina display kind of package, right? Maybe they will rebrand it to include it in retina some way you've got like the liquid retina display and all those names that they've given the displays over time and it feels like that this is going to become a technology that people are going to start expecting more and more and more devices. And it would be, you know, I've seen people saying like the Mac can support if you have a high refresh monitor, like it can look really good. I've seen a lot of people talking about that kind of stuff on Twitter recently.

So it'd be really wonderful to see Apple build this into their products. Maybe that new iMac or maybe that screen that we all hope will come will be a high refresh rate monitor as well as the laptops we'll see i want to pick obviously something that's near and dear to my heart is apple pencil support um especially in the the laptops there's some other stuff that i want to

we're going to talk about in a little bit which could enable this uh and may enable this to work well but i think it would be wonderful to see the Apple Pencil expand into other devices and really kind of like solidify as an input method, as an artist tool, as a notebook, as a meeting note tool as it's becoming. I think it would be really great to see it not just be an iPad feature anymore. You know, it started as an iPad Pro feature, then became across the entire product line for iPad. And like promotion, let's start breaking that outside of just from one device. Let's make the Apple Pencil as important to Apple as a trackpad is, you know, I think that would be

really wonderful to see. Yeah, now, obviously, there are going to be some ergonomic issues there. But we're going to, I suspect, to deal with that before we get come to the end of the list but i definitely think that apple pencil support should be there so one of the motivators of doing this is looking at the big sur design which sort of rounds everything and spaces everything out a little bit more menu items are spaced out more the menu bar is taller there is definitely this feeling that um that it feels like they're trying to make it a more acceptable interface for touch than the Mac has been before. And then you throw in the fact that Apple Silicon Macs are going to be able to run apps from iPad and iPhone that were built for touch. And while they will probably work okay with a pointer in many cases, not necessarily in all cases. And while the Mac is always going to be, I believe, a keyboard and pointer driven interface primarily, with the iPad,

what we've seen is you can have a touch primary device that also does Apple Pencil and also does keyboard and mouse or trackpad. So I am going to say it. I get the sneaking suspicion that we're going to, that I would even say all Apple Silicon Macs may be touchscreen Macs, that this is the time when they do this. And the reason is because it's not the primary, but it can be very nice to reach up to your screen and scroll something. And then you've got, you're going to have some apps on there that are built primarily for touch that will work better if you can reach up and touch them. I think that I know like people have had lots of opinions on this over time. Apple have spread their feelings on this over time.

You know, I think many years ago on an episode of the talk show at wwdc i think phil schiller kind of referenced it as like monster arms like holding your arms out and touching yeah zombie arms zombie arms yeah that argument is gone now because of the ipad pro you know the ipad pro is as much a laptop in its design now and the way that apple markets and sells the thing as any other laptop that apple makes. So the idea of thinking that a touchscreen shouldn't be in that form factor is wrong. Now, if we're looking at desktop Macs,

that becomes trickier to put touchscreens there. Like my iMac Pro, as far away as it is for me right now, I don't know if I would want to be reaching up and touching that, but any laptop, yeah, I would want to be able to do that in the same way that I want to be able to sometimes to do that on my Apple Pro when I have it with my magic keyboard on. Most of the time I use the trackpad, but sometimes I'm reading an article, I'll just reach out and swipe. Or I just don't have that moment broken in my brain where I just reach out and

instinctively touch a thing and nothing happens, right? Which happens to me more and more when I use Mac laptops now. So enabling that functionality would be nice. I think that the future of computer users, like younger people now, expect touchscreens. And they're not on Macs, but they are on the rest of the PC industry. They're baffled by the fact that Macs don't support this.

And for people who are like, oh no, Apple said they won't do it. So therefore it will never happen. I will point out to two things. One of which is the iPad has a keyboard and a mouse with a cursor. And the Apple Pencil is a thing when there was that famous line about,

if you see a stylus, they blew it. Which was not about this quite because it was about primary input method, which is really sort of the point. So Apple adding touchscreen to screen to max they're going to say well now is the time and it makes sense because we it's the typical apple thing right well we didn't before because it wasn't any good but now that we did it it's good that's what they do and also like the bigger thing which you mentioned the biggest argument is just look at

big sir and you'll see that that is designed for touching. Yeah, look at Big Sur and ponder the fact that a bunch of touch apps are going to run on Mac, Silicon Macs and then tell me that they're not going to do it. Because there's been a lot of people saying like, if an app needs multi-touch, how will that work if I only have a mouse? Yeah, yeah. I was listening to a podcast.

I think it might've been ATP where they were talking about this or maybe it was connected. And I immediately was like, well, you'll just reach up to the screen for that. That's the answer. You'll reach up to the screen. And people are like,

well, what about current Macs? But current Macs don't do this. This is for Apple Silicon Macs. So it's no existing Macs. It's a feature running these apps is a feature that doesn't exist on the older hardware

the Intel hardware but the new hardware all supports it so it makes sense that that's the dividing line now my next point I don't know what I think about this but I would be intrigued to see it which would be some kind of wild hinge design from Apple.

So if they're going to put touchscreen on it, if they're going to put Apple Pencil support on it, would Apple ever consider making a two-in-one Mac? Now, the idea of you take the screen, flip it all the way around to the other side, and you kind of now have it as a tablet. I don't know how i feel about this one because that feels like it might be pushing into ipad land too much but if they could come up with something really cool from a design perspective like an industrial design perspective maybe they'd do it yeah i think the i think the the rule that I'm going by is Apple is not going to push one shape group into another area, if that makes sense.

So like iPad owns the I'm a standalone. People are like, are they going to make a Mac Surface that doesn't have anything and then you attach a keyboard to it? And I would say no, they're not. Because that's the iPad. That's what the iPad is. Likewise, I think Apple's not going to make an iPad laptop now because iPad doesn't go into laptops. There's already a laptop and it's the Mac. Convertible is interesting, but I think if you define a Mac as being something with a keyboard attached to it and it's a keyboard primary device, the idea that they might make

one where you can fold the keyboard back, maybe not take it off, but fold it back or turn it around or do something that makes a convertible, like a PC laptop convertible or two in one, maybe with some unique features of Apple's design that we don't anticipate, kind of like that magic keyboard for iPad was not quite what we thought it would be. Some clever little things they do. That I could see because keep in mind, if there's a touchscreen on an Apple Silicon laptop, that means it's running basically all iPad apps. And at that point, when you fold that keyboard back, you could treat it like an iPad, and it's an iPad. And then you fold the keyboard back around, and now it's a Mac again. I think that could work. I don't know whether they're going to do it either, but it's certainly an option for them is to generate these laptops that don't act like today's laptops because they've got the touch

interface and they've got all of those iPhone and iPad apps that are running. And you get people then saying, and I'm sure there are many people screaming at their podcast player right now and saying, but that would kill the iPadad but i don't think it would because that is going to be an okay tablet experience it's not exactly a good one it's going to be thick it's a laptop yeah that can kind of behave like a touch device in certain circumstances just like the ipad right now is a touch device that can behave like a laptop in certain circumstances. So it becomes, it already is, but like even more so it becomes what's your priority. And I heard from a lot of people last week who said, okay, well, will Jason buy a laptop

and start using a Mac laptop again because it'll run iPad apps? And my answer is probably no, because the thing that I actually like the most is that the iPad is primarily a touch tablet that's very light and that I can connect a keyboard to. And I don't anticipate that a Mac laptop is going to be that. But for some people, the Mac laptop, a lot of people are like, I tried the iPad, but it just doesn't work for me. It's just not like those people. It might be perfect to have something that is primarily a laptop, but can become an okay tablet when you want it to be. And then it goes back to being a laptop the rest of the time. I'm intrigued by this product idea that we've created.

Yeah. So let me extend the ergonomics since we're talking about ergonomic stuff. The other place that this goes is the iMac design with something that's more like the Surface Studio. If you've got a touchscreen Apple Pencil iMac, how does that work? And I think Microsoft has already showed us that the way that works is by having it be supremely adjustable. And I think this is another one of those engineering challenges for Apple that Apple might delight in doing. It might also be something that reminds us a little bit more of the G4 iMac, right, where there's a base, and then there's also the floating thing. I don't know whether

the computer's in the base or in the screen, but if you've looked at that Surface Studio product, it's really interesting ergonomically because it can sit up like an iPad, but you can also drop it down right in front of you and then use touch or use a stylus and go into kind of a pen input mode or a touch input mode. And if the Mac supports touch and runs iPad apps, plus Photoshop and things like that that support pen events today, that's a really compelling thing. And then you just pop it up and it's a computer again,

like a traditional computer again. I think that that could be amazing. But you need to have all these other pieces. We're getting ourselves excited now. But Jason, all of this makes me really excited about the Mac again. I knew we'd find a way. I knew we'd find a way, Mike. Look, again, I don't mean to be mean right like it's not all like to say that the mac

is is boring just my tastes what i'm interested in has changed over time and for me personally the mac feels like it's just kind of being it what is. And I like new. And the iPad has continued to be new and do new things. And it's added new peripherals, new ways of interacting with a computer. And I've been very intrigued by that and excited by that. And I would really love to get this stuff

that we're talking about today in a Mac because then I'm going to be like really excited about the mac again and i'm i would like that you know the the way i've been thinking of it is apple has spent the last decade plus building a brand new platform and with the ipad figuring out new ways of doing things that the Mac figured out in 1984. But like the modern way of doing that to some success and some not success. And when you look at all of the features

that we've listed and some more that we'll talk about here, one of the things, the sense I get, and maybe some of this is wishful thinking, but the sense I get is what's happening now is Apple saying, now that we've built this platform up to this level, we can bring this stuff to the Mac. Now that we've got our own chips in there, we're confident that our chips are going to be good enough to meet all the demands of the Mac, we're going to now be able to bring all that stuff over that we've been running on this other platform

and the Mac gets that stuff too. And that's what I really hope happens is that one of the reasons the Mac has been kind of meandering for the last few years is they were treating it as a legacy platform. And then they had a change where they thought, no, we're going to bring the Mac in. The way the Mac survives is not by not changing

and just sort of sitting out there because it's going to die. Instead, we're going to bring it in and it's going to share so much with our other platforms. Also, Apple's not that big a company in terms of people and maintaining two completely separate operating system platforms is not great. So now the less of that they need to do the better. The Mac becomes super set of ipad and iphone features so that's that's why i'm excited too is that i do think this is the opportunity for all these things that they've invented over the last 10 years to get poured back into the mac why do it why i mean some of them they've done with the t2 processor right there's stuff that they were like

okay we'll do this we're going to build our own custom chip and bypass intel stuff but i feel like there's a lot of stuff they left on the table because like perhaps what you're about to say because sort of sort of like well let's just wait let's just wait and we'll do this when we control the whole the whole thing which we don't right now i would like to see face id find its way to the mac yeah Along with better webcams in general, just I'll throw this one in there as a side note. But Face ID would be fantastic on the Mac. As we said, since we first saw it, it feels like an inevitability.

It's just a case of Apple being able to build the technology inside of the screens, which are very thin screens, right? Now, I don't know how much space they actually need for the face id um stuff in general but i would really really love to see them do that and if it's a touch screen touch screens may actually have to have a little bit more thickness too so it might be one of these things that it goes along with adding a touch screen is adding a better webcam but you're right the webcams need to be better windows pcs have had essentially face id in some form for ages now it seems windows hello exactly and maybe apple's implementation may be better and it may be different it may be more secure whatever but it's still a similar technology

they're using ir right so like you know we exactly think everything else is just how it's processed and i love touch id on laptops but I use a desktop every day. And I would love for Face ID to work on an iMac, right? Because I work on an iMac every day, and it's not something that they can add outside. For security reasons, they really can't add it, I think, outside the box. And even then, you'd have to use their keyboard or something like that. I use an Apple Watch for that, which is nice, but I think face ID is a, is a logical thing. And yes, the webcams need to be better, um, across the board.

Um, I'll throw in a little minor thing. I think we've only got a couple more here. Um, mine is a little, little minor thing that if you look, developers have been talking about this this week, uh, this past week. Um, there are some new, uh, things that you do when you're building Mac apps that involve checking for a safe area, which like, well, why is there a safe area? And the answer is they are totally going to curve the edges of the Mac screen like they do it on the iPad. Every piece ui that they have built in big everything has a curve curved and if you put a curved window up against a sharp corner what's the point of that yeah so i think that

that is um i think they're going to take all of the edges around that and you know the original mac had curved edges curved little corners so it's also hearkening back to the old days but i think it's just it's very hard to imagine that they won't. I was looking at my iPad Pro just this morning and thinking, oh yeah, that's totally what they're going to do. And it's a little thing. It's just a little thing, but I think they're going to do it. Curved screen edges.

And we're talking about like, if you look at an iPad, the actual UI, the operating system is curved. It's not, the corner doesn't meet in a sharp point like it does on the Mac. That feels modern now because that's what our iOS devices do. Your iPhone has curved edges on it too. So that feels like what you see

in a modern computer now. Even though, as you say, it goes all the way back to the beginning of the Mac, it may be time to see curved edges coming back to Mac displays. The last one I want to mention is just no more tapers.

Like thin designs, but like flat edges and stuff like that. You know, we've been talking about this, the iPad Pro design language. I would like to see the iPadad pro design language also brought to the laptops all the things ipad pro all the things flat edge design um i think that will look really cool uh i want different industrial design across these new laptops as well which i think apple's gonna do i think every apple silicon, except for the Mac Pro,

won't look like the Macs they're replacing. Yeah, I wonder about the MacBook Air, only because they got beat up about that. And so they brought back a new computer that looks just like the old MacBook Air. You could just call it the new MacBook Air. I think the problem was they just didn't have a MacBook Air anymore. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right i i i hope so i'm not sure how whether they're capable of completely redesigning every single product but then again they have they have kept these products looking the same for a long time yes and again this is the thing is maybe it's wishful thinking but i look at this moment and I think this is what they've been doing the last couple of years.

They've been turning over the Mac in the background, but they couldn't ship any of it because it all was predicated on the Apple Silicon. And that was the moment and that we're going to just see them doing this. I hope that's what it is. I hope that's true because I will say as exciting

as the Apple Silicon stuff is, if we're here in a year and the Macs that are being sold by Apple are essentially the same Macs that are being sold now, except without Apple Silicon, I will be disappointed because these are not just wishlist items because we're fun and it's exciting and it's the summer of fun. It's also, these are things we want that Apple makes on other products and it should be on the Mac too.

It's also, these are things we want that Apple makes on other products and that should be on the Mac too. We haven't picked anything here except for maybe some of the ergonomic stuff, like the way that they're not doing in other places. But even then, they're still doing really interesting ergonomics on the iPad with like the magic keyboard, right? That cantilevered hinge, like that's wild from a design perspective so i don't feel like anything we've said here is like real pie in the sky type stuff these all feel possible i want to see how much they'll do the last thing i'll mention this is not on the list but i want

to just gauge your interest in this we talk about new design what do you think about new names yeah i i don't know i mean i think i i could see it but i think that maybe that's a bridge too far and that the slots are fairly well named and you know i could see them doing a new consumer laptop name i feel like the imac has so much cachet now it would be very hard to make something that wasn't the imMac. I did suggest at some point that maybe they could retire MacBook Pro and call it like PowerBook or something like that, because that's a fun name that they retired and they could bring back because MacBook Pro is a mouthful. I think if they got rid of Mac, they just replace it with Apple. And I don't think they're going to call them Apple Books. Yeah. So, and I think Mac is going to be in every name because I think they're going to call them Apple books. Yeah. So,

and I think Mac is going to be in every name because I think they've just decided that that's a thing. Although, you know, I, I don't know, I guess it's possible, but if I had to bet,

I would bet that they won't because the, by redesigning them, if they truly redesign them, they want to reassure you of what, you know, what kind of animal is this, right? It's like,

I know it looks, it's shaped a little different, but it's still a zebra, right? Like, I think they wouldn't be like, I know it's different, but it's still an iMac. This is the iMac. It's just the next one. And that's the advantage. If they had renamed the iMac when they went to the iMac G4 or to the Intel iMac or something like that, it would be like, oh, here's a new computer that's kind of like the iMac. And instead by calling it the iMac, you're like, no, it's just the new iMac. It changes shape, but it's still an iMac and you know what that means. So I think that that's the trick is you change the shape, but keep the name so that there's some continuity happening.

That was a great way to start the summer of fun, Jason. I agree. I'm glad it came early this year. We need some fun, right? We need 2020, bring in the summer of fun. We need that fun more than ever. Well, it's good. It's probably going to be the longest summer of fun we've ever done. We started earlier and we're going to finish it later. More fun. More fun. to you by our friends over at Linode. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure,

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and you will get $20 towards your next project of credit from them. So that's fantastic. L-I-N-O-D-E.com upgrade and the promo code upgrade2020 for that $20 credit. Our thanks to Linode for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Before we wrap up today, should we bring back Hashtag Ask Upgrade? It's been a couple of weeks. Yes, the lasers were waiting. Marlies from the Discord

asks, should I wait for the public beta or beg my former employer to add me back to the developer account? You know, it sounds to the developer account. You know, it sounds like the developer beta is pretty solid, but, um,

and, and Marley's didn't say what, uh, what OS here, but I would just say, I, Apple says that they're going to do public betas in July. It's about to be July.

I think you could, I think you could wait. The nice thing about being on the public beta track is that if there's a disaster, they just don't put it on the public beta track. Like it all, because the public beta is just staggered from the developer beta release. And they do that in case of trouble.

So I would say, don't talk to your former employer. Who cares about those people? Just wait for the public payment uh robin also from the members discord had a question that we didn't really address in our building of the apple silicon mac do you think that battery life or performance would be the most appealing focus for apple what are they going to optimize for do you think jason um both i would say right i would say that they're going to look for a balance

but i think that there are i suspect that there is a battery life goal that they want to hit and that there's a performance goal they want to hit because i know that they want to come out and not have it be these macs are slower right they can't do that so they're going to have it be these Macs are slower, right? They can't do that. So they're going to have to be faster. So the nice thing about it is the way that Apple Silicon is structured is they have performance cores and power saving cores. So the processors, because they are from mobile devices, when they want to extend battery life, they can actually prioritize items

for the power saving cores and let the performance cores sit idle. So it's not quite the same choice you'd make on an Intel Mac, but I do think they've got performance things that they will hit, and then they've got a battery number. They don't want the battery life to be worse. They don't want the performance to be worse. They don't want the performance to be worse. And then after that, my guess is they're going to want to push up incrementally until they get to, there's a certain point at which I think they're going to say the battery life's okay and let's go for performance here. But I think they're going to actually quote really great battery life and performance numbers. And the trick is that because these processors have both kinds of cores, what they're going to be able to say is in this kind of work, the battery lasts, web browsing, the battery lasts 20 hours or 15 hours or whatever.

And then in super intense work, the battery will last less, which is true now, kind of, but it's really going to be potentially true with these chips. So I think they want to push them both up. They want to meet certain boundaries. And then beyond that, I think they are, you know, maybe on a more pro model, they'll push performance a little more. And on a more consumer model for laptops, they'll push battery life. But they want them both to be good. Jason, not you, asked, what's the one iOS app that you're most looking forward to running on your Mac?

For me, it is the Time Tracker app that I use called Timery. I use a web service called Toggle for the time tracking, and they have a Mac app, but it's bad. And even just using the iOS version of Timery would be a big upgrade, even if they don't do a Catalyst version. So that's the one that I am really, really looking forward to being able to have that, which is one of my favorite iOS apps. like really, really looking forward to being able to have that, which is one of my favorite iOS apps. I would love to see that one come to the Mac.

And if I just get it via the iOS stuff on Apple Silicon, I'll be very, very happy. Do you use shortcuts with that though? Yeah, but- Yeah, so there's no shortcuts on the Mac. But the app itself is fantastic. All right, okay. Because it's like, I always have the Timery app open.

And so the Toggle app open on my Mac. And at the moment, I have to just go in and if I'm setting a timer on my Mac, choose from the dropdowns. And it's way nicer. It's a way better experience, even if I just use the iOS app. All right.

For me, the one that I keep thinking of is MLB at Bat, the Major League Baseball app, assuming that baseball is played at some point in the future. Because they offer, it's a great app, and there's all sorts of detail in there, and they have a lousy website. And this is going to be a trend. It'll be interesting to see what apps get put in the store and what don't. and what don't. I think a good example of why you want iOS apps on your Mac is that a lot of experiences are, we built an app,

and if you can't run it, here's our lousy website. And there are lots of websites that I would rather use their app, but on the Mac, I can't. So watching video on MLB at Bat is better. I want that. Also, a lot of Flash stuff is going away, and a lot of stuff was built with Flash. And I wonder how they're going to rebuild that stuff. But the Flash apps are lousy. So there are lots of reasons. But

MLB at Bat is a good example of something that I prefer their app vastly to their website. And then like Ferrite, the iPad editing app, audio podcast editing app that I use, that will be great when it comes to the Mac. And I'm looking forward to that too. Ryan asks, how many years do you think we'll be on Mac OS 11? Or is this a time when they increment the number every year like they do on iOS? I think it'll be a while. I think it's going to be like 10, like it will be 11.1, 11.2. I don't think we're going to get Mac OS 12 anytime soon. I agree. I agree. I think it'll be, you know, five or 10 years.

Yeah. Which I think just fits better. Like if they were going to go for the annual incrementing, then they may have just, just, they may as well have just called this Mac OS 14. Exactly. Keep them all at the same. If they weren't going to, if they were going to increment it every year, I don't think they're going to do that. I don't think they moved this year because that's the new trend. I think it moved this year because they're making so many changes that 11

felt right. And I think it's now going to be a new number every year. Finally today, Brandon in the RelayFM members Discord asked, is Apple's tag product dead or do you think they're going to release it in the fall with the new Find My API? Which snuck in

this one, that there is an API that Apple have developed where you will be able to integrate your tracking product into find my so for example in theory if you are a company like tile who have raised an antitrust complaint against apple you can integrate your application and your devices i should say with, with the Find My app, potentially leveling a playing field a little bit more for a tracking product, which might be a very good thing to do if you have lots of antitrust probes

against your company right now. Yeah, when I saw this, my initial thought was, oh, is Apple Tags not happening? But I think you're right. I think it's just as likely that this allows them, is Apple Tags not happening? But I think you're right. I think it's just as likely that this allows them to launch Apple Tags and do what they should be doing, right? Which is competing on the quality of their product and not the fact that they control the Find My infrastructure. And so that way, if Tile wanted to build something that was Find My compatible,

they could do it and it would work fine. And then they're just going to have to compete with Apple on all of the other ways that they compete, but they, they not that you're barred from the find my little mini ecosystem. So I, there's so much detail about those Apple tags that it would be hard. It's hard to believe that they aren't going to actually ship at some point. And this was a bad time.

Like it's, this is a bad time for that product. So maybe later it will be a better product. But it's also possible that Apple is like, let's just let the third parties do it and we're not going to bother. It's possible. If you would like to send in a question for a future episode of Upgrade,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade or in the RelayFM members Discord, use the command question mark askupgrade and you can submit your questions there. In the Upgrade Plus post show today we're going to talk about some early impressions of the betas that we've been using. If you want to sign up for Upgrade Plus you can go to getupgradeplus.com and sign up. Thank you to all of our wonderful members that have signed up already and we hope that you continue to enjoy the content. As we mentioned the summer of fun has begun it happened uh it's by surprise today but we have another uh topic that

we're going to do next week which you can prepare for at home uh we're going to be doing a mic at the movies about the hamilton movie on disney plus so that's going to be uh in next week's episode me and jason are both very excited about that one. Cannot wait to watch the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. So we're going to be doing that next week, which will be a very long-term follow-up from the Mike at the Movies we did when I went to see Hamilton.

Mike at the Matinee, I think, is what we called it. Will this be Mike at the Matinee or Mike at the Movies? I guess it's movie now, right? Yeah, or it's upstream. Maybe it's upstream. Oh, boy. Upstream might come back next week. I have a ton of headlines,

but we just haven't had the space to fit them in. So we've got a lot of stuff going on next week. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Upgrade. You can find links and information about this episode at relate.fm slash upgrade slash 304. I want to thank again our sponsors for this episode, Pingdom, Linode, and Bombas. If you want to find Jason online,

go to sixcolors.com or he is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at iMike. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.

Summer of fun! Summer of fun! Summer of fun!